How to prevent shopping cart abandonment

How to prevent shopping cart abandonment

Shopping cart abandonment is a huge problem for retailers, and especially for digital retailers. According to recent research from the first quarter of 2016, an enormous 74.3% of digital carts are abandoned worldwide. In fact, shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges in the world of online stores. There are many reasons why it happens and lots of ways to potentially reduce the number, but there is no miracle solution. To find the right way to reduce shopping cart abandonment in your store, you need to understand as much as possible about your customers’ behavior. While you are doing that, here are a few tips that might help you out.

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Why are people abandoning their carts?

There are many many reasons why carts are abandoned. Sometimes there are good reasons for abandonment, for example: the product was too expensive, there were unexpected shipping costs, or shipping just takes too long, etc. Often shipping costs and timing are only revealed at a very late stage in the progress, meaning many customers choose to abandon their purchase at the very last moment. These reasons seem relatively obvious and straightforward, but there are some interesting stats that show trends beyond the obvious ones. For example, it turns out most abandonments happen on Tuesday and fewest happen on Saturday.

Abandonment is an opportunity

Business is all about transforming challenges into opportunities and this is another instance where a problem can be leveraged. Shopping cart abandonment seems bad, but think of it another way; over $4 trillion dollars of merchandise is likely to be abandoned every year, and overall shopping cart abandonment rates are increasing year by year, but BI Intelligence believes up to 63% of this amount can be salvaged by savvy online retailers.

Customers come back

Not all abandonment means goodbye forever. Often customers aren’t ready to complete a sale, so they abandon it with the intention of coming back later. But there are a few problems here. First of all, many customers are simply browsing with no real intention of completing a purchase. It takes the right product, website and checkout process to convince them to buy, and sadly the stars don’t always align. It is therefore important to identify the ones who intend to come back (if possible). It’s also crucial to remind them to do so. With a hugely busy schedule, a lot of potential customers may simply forget about the great products they were planning on buying. Finding the right omnichannel remarketing response for these kinds of customers means bringing them back to your store and completing a sale.

Make your site amazing

Every element of your site is part of the story that tells your customer to stay put and buy or come back and complete a purchase. This means every part of it must be user-friendly. Key areas to watch are minimizing loading times, simplifying the checkout process and above all else, building trust by being transparent about what you do. There is no point hiding shipping times and rates – be up front about them and they won’t scare customers off later on in the process. And while you know your products are awesome, saying that isn’t enough. Hearing other customers sing your praises is a much more persuasive way to show the quality of your products or services. This means utilizing online reviews and encouraging your customers to leave positive feedback. Every customer who write a review, or even better – recording one, encourages all your other site visitors to complete their purchase.

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